


Strange Birds

by Davidlynchschreibner



Category: Druck | SKAM (Germany)
Genre: And so much pining, Expanded Backstory, Friendship, Gender Dysphoria, Healing, M/M, Sibling bond, Transphobia, Trauma, True Love, copious introspection, don't worry he is not a bird all the time, metaphorical retelling, or magical realism if you prefer because if you want David to be a shapeshifter go for it, s3 from David's POV
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25434640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Davidlynchschreibner/pseuds/Davidlynchschreibner
Summary: You don't let the pang in your wing manifest as a grimace when you arrange yourself carefully. Still he scoops you up in gentle hands and cups you close to his chest like you’re precious. Warmth seeps into the sharp splinters of your broken pieces and you can feel your heartbeat throbbing around them. You want to rest on the soft plain of his palms forever.or: season 3 from David's POV
Relationships: Matteo Florenzi/David Schreibner
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20





	Strange Birds

**Author's Note:**

> It's here at last! Having as many unfinished fics in my docs as I do this was not the story I intended to tell but I guess it is the one that needed to come out. Unlike some other fics it’s been my passion project which I spent a lot of time and energy loving into being. Perhaps canon is not this deep or dramatic but it’s meant to be an artistic piece which began as a poem. I hope it at least brings someone else the same catharsis that I felt writing it. This one’s for all the trans kids who have struggled to get off the ground. 
> 
> Many thanks to Vlindervin for her generous counsel on Muslim culture, and to the many wonderful people who have supportively listened to me whine and stress during the process of writing this. Much love to you. 

**Trigger warnings for this chapter: (vague) reference to racial micraggressions and Islamophobia, dysphoria and body changes, references to binding, less than supportive parents, transphobia, violence (metaphorical but upsetting)**

* * *

You are a boy with pin feathers growing from his skin. They are obscured at first by pastel shirts and pocketless jeans but you feel them spread day by day like a rash. Each one itches fierce as a mosquito bite and the shape of them lays clothes oddly on your gawky frame. They make shirts into plate mail pressing, pulling, ruffling the little flurries of inhuman hue. Your mother’s ever-diligent fingers pluck at them as if to remove lint and you jerk and squirm away. At first those pin feathers are soft and small but still fabric drags on them irritatingly when you run. You beg for the comfort of the wider, longer cuts other boys wear. Even when they’re swapped for darker colours and looser fit you still feel the store section from which they come in the seams that catch and tug. It perturbs you that the world cleaves to this color-coded dichotomy. The smooth-skinned people in adverts smilingly sell the divide and you don’t see yourself in any of their faces. 

Your favourite friend notices blue down peeking out of your shirt collar one day and she asks why it’s there. You wish someone would enlighten you, as well. _It just is_ , you answer with the susurrus of a secret. You know the feathers are strange--- or you are. Other children seem to inhabit their skin so comfortably while yours doesn’t feel as if it belongs to you. You think at first it’s the way certain people look at you. At your earthy colouring, at the picture you make standing with your grandmother, when you mention Eid. But your family seems confused when you ask how they tolerate this disconnect. Only frustration is found in attempts to explain something so vividly present yet abstract. The feeling is left to haunt quietly. It cannot be any wonder there are feathers pushing out of the too-small suit you’ve been packed into, escaping through any space they can find. Perhaps there is a whole other skin inside you that wants to rise to the surface. You lie on your back and stare at the span of your small brown hands looking for the shape of the person that’s buried underneath. You can feel him, sometimes, coiled in your chest and imprinted on the backs of your eyelids. The heaviness of two bodies makes your limbs ache. 

There is a cluster of little feathers two centimetres above your shoulderblades that are pushed upward by the low necks of dresses. It’s a painful recurring reminder when you’re ‘dressed up’ that your body is not made for these fashions. The looseness is comfortable but the fluttering skirt is a terrible pairing with your love of climbing. Dirt and debris against the bright colours and panels of white tattles on where you’ve been like a gossiping classmate. You can’t bear the way your skin rubs together and prickles with moisture when you’re told to close the comfortable sprawl of your legs. When you try to commiserate with your friend, her knees bruised like yours and hair escaping its tie, she shrugs and demurs that it’s not modest. You think of your grandmother covering her hair and skin each day in soft fabric. The rituals and rules of modesty that your grandparents believe in have never been for you. Your mother doesn’t follow that code either but she rebukes you for mishandling dresses all the same. It makes you balk; these rules cannot be comfortably applied when boys whose chests are identical to yours swim half nude in the open. If only you could wear whatever you want, and less of it.

It’s meant kindly but makes your skin crawl when your classmate tells you how pretty you look in your formal wear. This is a nice word, a welcoming one, not one of those which makes you feel small and ugly. But you don’t want to be ‘pretty’. You are not a plastic doll made up to look its best, the delicate curve of a painted cup, the fragile petals atop a thin-stalked flower. ‘Pretty’ is a word meant to flatter girls. You don’t like ‘she’ and ‘her’ and ‘girl’--- they make your stomach drop like missing a staircase step in the dark. Instead you want him to sling a companionable arm about you and laugh when you pin him to the ground. Peers don’t understand you and how you wish to exist. All the children are made keenly aware that no matter how alike your clothes seem and regardless of what you play in the schoolyard boys and girls are not the same. There are girls a little like you who cut their hair short and tumble in the grass but they don’t question and chafe. Their lives unwind with a surety you cannot fathom. Though your sister often wears trousers and unisex tops she cherishes her girlhood and winds flowers into the waves of her hair. You have no name for what it is that sets you apart but you feel it as tangibly as the temperature of the air. 

Only your mother sees the soft tufts of feather that are almost buried in the cloud of wild curls that floats around your shoulders. She tells you that your hair is worthy of pride, a beautiful inheritance, but you hate the way it feels like sodden seaweed on your arms when it’s wet. After you’ve told her this she tries to appease you by gathering it back into a tight plait. You coil it into a thick knot at the back of your head so you can pretend it isn’t there. All these soft draperies of hair and cloth and assumptions make you feel stifled. One day in sports you’re competing against a girl who hates losing as much as you do and when you try to pass her she grabs onto the plait at the back of your head and _drags_. The abuse hurts like a thousand hot needles and you stumble as intended, captured in her fist like a fish on a line. Suddenly you’re so angry you can’t breathe at all. At her, at your mother, at yourself. It burns like acid in your belly for the rest of the day. That night after your bath you take mother’s herb scissors to every last curl and don’t care how your badly shorn hair springs up from your skull.

Over time others begin to notice the feathers multiplying but seem to agree not to speak of them, as if they will fall out with the neglect. Not a single feather drops. Occasionally you tug one lightly to check, curious, and release it when there’s a sting. It’s more the opinions of people about them that you mind rather than the feathers themselves. They unnerve your mother, make your father sigh, are so diligently ignored by your grandparents that you wonder if they know you at all. Your sister doesn’t impart her judgement but she ruffles the mess of blue affectionately when you begin to feel self-conscious. She is the only person with whom you can exist in raw form. It’s not that she isn’t interested in the unusual adornments in that inescapably human way but she accepts them as a selection of your many lovable parts. You’ve been coming to her with all your wounds, discoveries, and secrets since the time you learned to walk. Lying side by side you lose your strangeness as together you map a private universe across the canopy of a blanket fort. 

Friends at school are beginning to define themselves with lines that don’t make room for you. They fracture into groups, break off pieces of themselves that jut outside the boundary, start noticing each other’s outlines in new ways. You drift between clusters in search of one that feels restful. You’ve always got on fine with girls but you feel like an interloper among them, as if they’re speaking a dialect just a little different from yours. The boys make more sense to you but you set them nervous--- they aren’t sure if they ought to make you one of their own now. The rules of the mixed groups completely elude you with all the complex boundaries and interpersonal dynamics. You think the latter would be best but it seems that everyone has different ideas of what to do with you and who you should be. It’s difficult to maintain friendships when you always feel like a stranger. No matter where you go inevitably a flash of feather makes everyone stare. 

Shame hangs with expectation from the many hands thrusting it upon you. You recoil from each parcel. Frustration locks your joints and you want to protest this prescribed contrition but your voice fails to assert it aloud. Adults have so many ideas about ‘who’ and ‘what’ and ‘where’ which have always made you feel trapped. You want to strip the barriers away like a pair of outgrown shoes and run into the woods where the tranquil trees and the lawless beasts won’t tell you who you should be. But you’re too scared of the night to leave your human cage; you stay despite the oppressive feeling. Mother worries, more and more, because she knows how it feels to grow up different. You don’t want to be different, not really, and you tell her as much when she tries to guide you into 'accepting yourself'. Yet it is not in you to be someone other than you are. As new feathers pop out she anxiously tries to put you in shirts with progressively longer sleeves. You roll them up when she isn’t looking.

Your godmother’s home is your favourite place in the world. There’s a deep sense of safety insulating the walls of her tiny house. Inside them you can scream as loud and long as you need to, expelling whatever pressure has been building inside, and only she will hear. When you were very small you covered yourself in lake mud and pretended to be a monster--- she laughed as the mud smeared across her when you attacked. You think, in that small bitter place you try not to enter, that if you lived with her you wouldn’t understand shame so well. The feathers have never bothered her. She leaves the choice of whether they are bared or concealed entirely to you. When your clothes feel too tight she takes you shopping in funky secondhand shops and lets you buy boys trousers. There are days when the world has made you feel crushed and you pool allowance with your sister for a train ticket. You never need to announce that you're coming; every time you appear on her doorstep with frantic energy twitching in your legs she pulls you in and holds you until you melt. But you always have to go back to the world and the one place you can never escape: yourself.

At twelve your body is twisting in irreconcilable directions and it’s going all wrong. You see it with the startling clarity of a floodlight. Alien shapes push out of your skin and you try to shove them back in with sweat-damp shaking hands. They won’t flatten. The feathers come in thicker but fail to obscure insidious new curves. You’ve always been one long line of a child but now when you dress for the day you look down at a shape threatening to emerge with a mouth dry as the Sahara. In shapeless neutral clothes you hide the growth and hope it shrinks you back to size. If only you could put yourself through the wash, taking out the stains and diminishing your body to its former proportions. As you grow it becomes more and more difficult to breathe. You observe the way the other kids at school are themselves changing, compare the patterns, and the panic of what may happen to you is suffocating. Worry makes you feel as if you will burst like a balloon being overfilled. 

Instead of clothes to accommodate a growth spurt mother takes you to buy something unwanted. You refuse to make any comment as she asks you about colours and materials. One of them is the same saturated blue as your feathers but you hate it just the same. It’s ironic that surrounded by clothes you feel mortifyingly naked, caught in someplace you should not be, as the other shoppers pass. You are shepherded into a changing room and as soon as you click the lock you throw the underclothes into its corner. With your heart thudding in every artery you pack yourself into the opposite corner and hug your knees to your chest. You can feel those things staring at you like two round judgmental eyes. Eventually mother comes to ask if you’re alright and you tell her that you don’t want to do this. She tries to wheedle, baffled and frustrated, and you feel yourself winding tighter and tighter until you hit maximum pressure and rebound in a frantic spin. You seize the handful of underclothes and chuck them out of the dressing room stall. _Take them BACK._ She buys you the shapeless stretchy kind instead.

At thirteen everyone is catching up to each other’s changes. It doesn’t make you feel any less off. Ashamedly you covet those things which are coming to the boys at the same time as you damn them for setting you apart. Their voices begin to jump and dip, sometimes emerging in a chasmic rumble that makes your throat wither with self-consciousness. One of your friends has grown tall so suddenly that it rends his skin and you hate that you have to tip your head back to look at him. You’d stand on your tiptoes all day if only it would bring you level with his eyes. A fine dark fuzz begins to sprout on another’s lip and he’s smugly sure that the girls will see nothing of the awkward personality beneath it. You wonder if you too will have that smear of hair one day--- if everyone does but women shave it like they do their underarms. It would be alright with you if you grew hair there. Wanting of a deeper voice and longer legs makes your skin itch and you wish you could shed it like a reptile growing into a new stage of life.

You fill the pages of sketchbooks and paper your walls with drawings of all the people you wish you could be like. Not the variety of women your mother and your teachers wish to meet. Watchfully, feverishly, you record sharp-angled faces and messily sketch the spread of their bodies. You frame your wardrobe with pictures of trapped forms and shadowed buildings, as if the childhood monster-closet is giving up its nightmares. That's where you keep your old dresses and all the other things that frighten you. You try to capture snarling animals and the faces of creatures from scary films but those you keep in a folder and not where they will stare at you. Once in a while you turn to something softer, more hopeful, the sweet fantasy of a better time and a better you. These you tape to the pages of a damaged botany book your mother was going to throw out. But those drawings are fewer in number just like the days where you feel free. It's only paper and cannot make anything change no matter what you sketch or cut. Maybe it's true what one of the kids you sometimes hang out with said--- you think too much.

The torment increases. When your body betrays you in pain and red you curl tightly into a whorl as if that can hold the tide inside forever. You never knew so many fearful things waited there. Restrictive material gets layered daily one atop the other but still you think the eyes of the world can _see_ , though your sister offers reassurance that your body looks smaller than it feels. Inside your tight skin you feel your bones grow hollow and you stretch, stretch, fingers spread as they become soft vanes. The syllables in your mouth begin to twitter and chirp when you try to explain how you feel. _What am I?_ You ask a question to the void and it proffers a word. Eleven letters seem too short to be the compass of your being. Yet you try it on, find it fits in a way dresses never did, then press it close to your skin like a soft woolen sweater. _Who am I_ ? Pictures and words bloom before your eyes. _Soon_ , the void whispers back, _you will be weightless_. 

The sky is impossibly high above your head. You’ve not flown before--- have never thought you could--- but the endless expanse promises escape from the pressure of gravity. Far-off winged shapes flit and swoop together and you feel every feather in your flesh flick with a longing you can barely articulate. Regardless you try with the new language you’ve obtained. The distress lining your parents’ brows tightly tangles your emotions but you won’t be restrained. When they haltingly suggest plucking ( _maybe they won’t grow back_ ) you try to keep your shoulders from hunching defensively. Instead you puff yourself up with breath and feather in order to demand space. It is time to ask to be seen and heard without judgement. You have spent too long feeling like there is something wrong with you. It’s difficult not to nip at clumsy fingers when they tug too sharply but you remind yourself to be patient. 

Your sister is an inspiration, always calm as a glacier cooling your inflamed skin. When too much friction grinding down lights a blazing pyre inside you there are places you can retreat: to her deep water love and to your godmother’s gentle stream of support. You submerge yourself in the coolness of their acceptance and let it douse the flames. Under the surface the sounds above lose volume and shape so they don’t hurt as much. You close your eyes and let the teeth-jarring forms of those labels that are wrong become unintelligible. A deep breath sits in your lungs waiting for you to resurface and exhale. You need only enough approval from your parents to obtain the medical care you need. Though you ache for more you know you have been lucky. They do not love it but neither do they hate your unique body. So you tolerate the pain of their inept handling and don’t hoard resentment. You are not the child they think you are but you’re grateful they are not malicious poachers in the wild lands of your adolescence. 

Eventually your conviction is proven an immutable fact. They can see you’re serious when you spend each day encased in that precious (uncomfortable, tiresome, utterly necessary) garment your godmother bought you. Your sister pointedly calls you who you are and you preen a little each time. The feathers do not shed as some have hoped. If anything they gain new lustre that catches the light when you peel away your sweatshirt. You reintroduce yourself to your parents. A tense glance is exchanged as they silently implore each other to speak first. Your father tries, in his stolid way, to explain why he clings to the words he gave you at birth. Stubbornly you lift your chin higher than the hopes they’ve had for you and hold their eyes. The ‘r’ at the end of your pronoun rolls over your tongue like a sweet candy when you say it. You savor it. In that moment you can’t even taste the spoiled taint of the name and pronouns your parents still use. 

It’s more nerve-wracking than anything to explain this to your grandparents, who live in a world guided by a power you don’t understand and that touches yours only at the margins. You know the principles of Islam and the graceful ways your grandmother welcomes people into her home but have no clue what she will think of your becoming. She lives differently than you do and comes from two generations into the past. If your parents can barely grasp this it seems even more shaky here. Your hands are clenched into fists on the tabletop so hard that your blunt nails bite into your palms. She sees, of course, with the knowing eyes she passed down to you. The cool surface of her palm covers your burning hand and the fingers curled tightly relax in tiny spasms. It’s a stop-start confession that sets you on edge but you explain to her as best you can that she has a grandson she didn’t know about. After she is quiet for a while, contemplating as she does all else. She does not look upset when she responds. It will not be easy to adjust to, she says, but you are still her loved grandchild. Your fear dissipates. This is enough.

It’s a clean slope, your family’s acceptance. Your sister and godmother rise to the occasion: they eagerly affirm you as if they’ve never known you otherwise, seldom muddling the pronouns and always correcting themselves when they err. Grandfather and grandmother sit below: they blur your shape, settling you within an in-between place that’s not so difficult for their minds to navigate, and while it isn’t what you want at least they look at you with unchanged care. They will try, at their pace. The bottom that you keep striking and rolling away from is your parents. Father’s disagreement is less obvious than mother’s but he tells you that he can’t see you as his son. Mother can’t conceive of any of it. She mourns as if she’s suffered a loss, though her grief is politely hushed like the person standing at the back of the funeral. You don’t understand what she thinks has died--- you haven’t gone anywhere and you aren’t a new person. That’s the thing you wish you could shout. _I’m right here. Look at me._ Your parents tell you they love you, that they are not rejecting you, but you think it’s their fabricated idea of you that they hold most dear. 

Now that it is evident their arguments are futile your parents hand you to a specialist with a helpless shrug. She welcomes you into her office and examines you with the tight focus of a microscope. It frightens you to be observed by someone so closely but you don’t shrink away. Now you must talk, and talk, and expose your soft hidden self as best your swallow-coos can. Your plumage is fully formed and must be put on bold display. It’s terrifying like the vertiginous drop from a cliff but you are a special brand of brave. There is strength in your thin bones that no one could have imagined. You take monthly x-rays of them all in therapy, ghostly monochrome pictures of your inner world that the psychologist inspects. Times passes like a badly operated slideshow until finally she tells you that you’re ready. You step to the edge of the nest. You breathe in and hold it. You tip into empty space and open your wings. You fall. But then suddenly you don’t. 

You are a bird and the ground is rushing away from you. Your head spins with vertigo but you flap, again then again, and feel yourself rising. The pulse in your downy breast is loud as an earthquake but as you pass the grasping hands of trees it sounds like cheering. A celebration of your launch into space where nothing and no one can yank you down. You’ve broken the jesses, found your strength, discovered you are worthy of freedom. A pinprick of pain is lost in the burst of happiness. You don’t care about the time it will take and the lifelong effort you must exert. Viscous freedom runs in a torrent through your veins to suffuse every part of you with its long-awaited power. You feel it seep into your organs and out through the malleable membrane of your skin. The muscles in your back begin to strengthen, fed by new energy you’ve never had before. Every feather is formed perfectly and the wind glides over them. This is it, the sky at last. 

Turning toward the horizon you see the flock in the distance and long to join them but you hesitate and stall. You know you don’t yet possess their grace and it would be a terrible thing to crash into someone when you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s better to find your balance before you traverse that distance. The yearning doesn’t strain you. You feel hopeful for the first time as the sky stretches boundless before you with all the world on offer. For a moment you forget how megalithic the struggles on the ground are when seen up close. How you must return to them when your wings grow tired. From this distance all your cares seem so small that their details are indistinguishable. Spokes of sunlight flash in your eyes but you dive into them recklessly, drunk on the excitement of flight. You are young today but you will learn and change and find the ‘myself’ you’ve always been straining to reach. These wings are yours and with them you can go anywhere.

But there are dangers to being so visible. You don’t see from where the first stone comes. Only that it hits hard and you swerve, stunned, because until now you have been innocent of that fear which blots out the sun like a hawk’s shadow passing overhead. A cold primal dread washes over you as you sense your vulnerability. Another stone strikes your unsheltered side. You tell yourself it’s a mistake, a random occurrence, some small cold thing that will glance off you like a raindrop divorced from sodden branches. More streak toward you. You can see now the figures from which issue raucous yelling and peals of laughter. With a jolt you notice not all of them are young; some are old and should know better. You expect the pressure from adults but not the aggression. Like missiles the stones come while you dip and dodge desperately. You tell yourself their arms will tire before you do. But you can’t evade enough of the bombardment and you’re growing slower with each hit. 

Though you’re determined to right yourself it’s so hard when lightning bolts of pain are crackling up and down your skeleton. Your lungs feel full of razorblades as they heave against your ribs and you think they might tear to ribbons. Frantically you look around for someone to stop the stone-throwers. Your parents have been drawn from their home by the noise and stand there with hands closed and expressions that offer only regret. This was your choice, they told you once, and not their responsibility. They do nothing to defend you. Bystanders gather to watch with the self-made impotence of people who know they should care but can’t be bothered to intervene. Defeat churns in your belly and the energy that has carried you wanes. Every time you try to change direction a stone whizzes past your beak. They’ve barred you in. Fatigue overpowers you and then… _SNAP_. Your vision goes black and you fall with the rocky rain.

Before you hit the ground you come back to yourself and manage to control your descent. Every unit of air pushing against your shattered wing hurts. But you will not crash--- you’re so good at keeping moving and do it instinctively. It’s a battle against gravity but you pull out of the fall and level out. As you descend you brace yourself before landing on the earth with a jarring thud. Balancing there you do not cry though the pressure in your eyes possesses the weight of the world. For a moment you pause and just try to breathe. A scream is swelling in your throat but you gulp it back. Every inch of its passage aches as you drive it down into your chest. You feel it become trapped there, ricocheting around like a ball in a pinball machine. No sound escapes. You must be quiet now and not draw attention to yourself. They’ve taught you that it’s not safe to be seen as you are. _False. Shapeshifter_ . _Eldritch thing._

Your eyes burn as you stare up at the distant sky. It seems only a moment ago you were soaring free. Now you are grounded by an intolerance you can’t comprehend. The land sprawling away from you is no solace, so frost-hard and cold against your bruised feet. But you’re saved for this moment. Against the vibrant blue of the sky you’re a target but here on this human surface you fade into the dirt. There is a whole world of clustered buildings and busy streets to be buried in. You scrabble and hop out of the wilderness and into a park. It’s a busy place milling with people and birds and bicycles but less likely to result in your destruction. If nothing else you can hide. Hiding is not cowardice; it’s fortitude. All this trauma and you have survived. Though exhausted and in agony you know now what is cradled inside your chest. You are so much stronger than your matchstick legs. 

In the thoroughfare you are moving, watching, braced for the feet stamping around you to come down on your bones. Not always with malice, you know, but the weight of cruelty and ignorance is the same. The clumsy ones are almost as dangerous as those that glean joy from feeling something break. People can be so careless toward whoever is differently shaped than themselves. They never look where they swing their feet and hands and words. Even the rarer careful ones make you nervous because pebbles skitter and litter swirls behind the slowest gait. You know even an unhurried foot can kick you in the ribs. They stutter an apology but don’t stop to ensure you’re unhurt. No, you’re charged with your own safety and must anticipate the steps of the crowd. It doesn’t take you long to learn the best ways to duck and dodge so you don’t call attention to yourself. You’ll become so indistinctly normal that you disappear. 

  
Wearily you crawl under a bench and wait there in the thick bands of shadow and light. The watery late winter sun makes pale spots of warmth on your back and you focus on the heat. Sometimes a passerby peers at you, talks to you, offers you a piece of bread. And you make yourself tall and hold your broken wing close because you’re fine. All of this is fine. You receive these little interactions with a feigned relaxed posture. Not a welcome but neither a sharp rebuff. A person muted, unknowable, a blank spot on the wall where they can hang any impression they like. They smile, appeased, and go about their business. They don’t see the truth of you. There’s a boulder of loneliness in your belly but you pretend it’s just hunger. You know that no one will offer help if they do not know you’re wounded but mending yourself in secret is better than venturing out to get crushed. Just wait. Eventually the path will quiet and you can crawl somewhere better to heal. You tell yourself that’s best.


End file.
